"Well, I guess! I'm a cloak-model in one of the biggest department stores in the United States."
"A cloak-model!" The term suggested only a wax-faced dummy to Jean. "What do you do?"
"Walk up and down before the millionaires' wives, and make the pudgy old things think they'll look as well as I do if they buy the garment. But they never do look as well. I got the place through a buyer who came to Meyer & Schwarzschild's once in a while. He saw that I have style and a good figure, and don't say 'ain't'—he really mentioned that!—and told the cloak department that I was the girl they were looking for. Sounds easy, doesn't it?"
It sounded anything but easy to Jean.
"And you like it?" she said. "But I needn't ask you that."
"Don't I! Maybe it doesn't give you thrills to parade up and down with a three-hundred-dollar evening wrap on your back! But cheer up," she added quickly, reading Jean's face. "I'm going down to Meyer & Schwarzschild's with you this morning and give you a rousing send-off."
X
The section of Broadway to which Amy piloted Jean, showing her all the short cuts which would save precious time at lunch hour, seemed wholly given over to wholesale establishments with signs bearing Hebrew names.
"Yes; this is Main Street of the New Jerusalem, all right," she assented to Jean's comment; "but you'll find there are Jews and Jews in the clothing trade. I'd hate to work for some of the chosen people I've seen, but you'd have to hunt a long time to find a more well-meaning man than old Mr. Meyer. I only hope he'll be down this morning."
Other workers, chiefly women and girls, crowded into the rough freight elevator by which they ascended, and one or two who got off with them at Meyer & Schwarzschild's loft greeted Amy by name. They inventoried her finery minutely, Jean saw, and nudging one another, arched significant brows when her back was turned. On her part, Amy took little notice of them, and, without introducing Jean, swept by toward the flimsy partition of wood and ground glass which shut the workrooms from the counting-room, brushed aside an office boy, who demanded her business, and knocked at a half-open door lettered, "Jacob Meyer, Sr."
The head of the firm, who bade them enter, was a very old man with a patriarchal beard. He smiled benignantly, recognized Amy after a moment's hesitation, asked about her new position, and patted her on the shoulder when she told him he must be as good to Miss Fanshaw as he had been to her. Turning to Jean, he said that Miss Archer had never sent them a poor worker.
"I have the highest opinion of Miss Archer," he added, with the air of a presiding officer who relished the taste of his own periods. "Her charity knows neither Jew nor Gentile. I met her first here in New York when some of us were trying a philanthropic experiment in the so-called Ghetto. It presented grave difficulties, very grave difficulties, and it is hardly too much to say,—in fact, I have no hesitation in saying,—that Miss Archer saved the day. I recall one most signal instance of her tact—"
He would have rambled on willingly, but Amy cut in with the statement that she must be off, squeezed Jean's hand encouragingly, and whisked out forthwith. Her abrupt exit seemed to disorder the deliberate clockwork of old Mr. Meyer's thoughts, for he sat some little time staring at a letter-file with his mouth ajar, till, recollecting himself at last, he brought forth, "As I was saying, my dear, I trust you'll like our ways,"—which Jean was certain he had not said at all,—and thereupon led her to the door of one of the workrooms and turned her over to its forewoman, a stout Jewess with oily black hair combed low to disguise her too prominent ears.
Work had begun, and the place was deafening with the whir of some thirty-odd close-ranked machines which, their ends almost touching, filled all the floor save the narrowest of aisles, where stood the chairs of the operators. To one of these sewing-machines and a huge pile of unstitched sleeves Jean was assigned. The task itself was simple, after the sound training of the refuge school, but the conditions under which she worked told heavily against her efficiency. The din was incessant, the light poor, the low-ceiled room crowded beyond its air-space, and the floor none too clean. As the morning drew on, the atmosphere became steadily worse. Now and then the forewoman would open a window,—she stood mainly by a door herself, turning and turning a showy ring upon her fat index finger,—but the relatively purer air thus admitted reached only the girls who worked nearest, of whom Jean was not one, and these soon shivered and complained of drafts.
By the time the hands of a dingy clock marked ten, her head was throbbing violently and her spine seemed one prolonged ache. Her neighbors, except a thin-cheeked woman who stopped now and again to cough, turned off their stints with the regularity of long habit, straightening only to seize fresh supplies for their insatiable machines. At twelve o'clock, when whistles blew from all quarters and the other employees, dropping work as it stood, scrambled for lunch-boxes or wraps, Jean relaxed in her chair, too jaded to rise. Food was out of the question,—even the look of the pickle-scented luncheons which some of the cloak-makers opened made her ill,—but she presently dragged herself outdoors, and striking down a cross street, at whose farther end she could see trees, came to a little park distinguished by a marble arch, where she wandered aimlessly till she judged it time to return.
The streets she retraced were now thronged with masculine wage-earners lounging and smoking in the doorways of their various places of employment. All paid her the tribute of a stare, and some made audible comments on her hair or eyes, or what they termed her shape. Her own doorway was also crowded. These idlers were, for the most part, girls from the many garment-manufactories of one sort and another which the great building housed; but a man stood here and there, either the leader or the butt of some horse-play. One of the young women who had scrutinized Amy in the elevator nodded to her and seemed about to speak, but Jean felt too heart-sick for words, and returned at once to her appointed corner in the hive, where, although it still lacked something of one o'clock, she again sat down to her machine. The air was better, for the windows had been thrown open during the noon-hour, but the room was in consequence very chill, and her fellow-workers, now drifting back in twos and threes, grumbled as they came. Among them was the girl who had greeted her below, and looking at her with more interest Jean read kindness in her freckled face. Their eyes met again, with a half-smile, and the girl edged down the narrow lane for a moment's gossip.
"You'll find it better to take a bite of lunch, even if you don't hanker for it," she observed.
"How do you know I haven't?" Jean asked.
"That's easy. For one reason, I seen you walkin' in Washington Square. For another, a green hand here don't never want lunch. Not used to this kind of thing, are you?"
"To the work, yes; not the noise, the bad air."
"Where'd you work last?"
"In a small town," she eluded.
"That's different. You don't have the sweat-shop in the country, I guess."
"Sweat-shop!" Jean had heard that sinister term before. "Is that what they call Meyer & Schwarzschild's?"
The girl laughed at her simplicity.
"I call it one," she rejoined, "even if it is on Broadway. Don't low wages and dirt and bad air and disease make a sweat-shop?"
"Disease! What do you mean?"
"Well, consumption, for instance. It isn't bronchitis, as she thinks, that ails the woman next machine to you. I could tell you other things, but what's the use! You won't stop here any longer than I will, and that's just long enough to find a better job."
The afternoon lapsed somehow. Once, a youngish, overdressed man with blustering manners and thick, bright-red lips came into their workroom and told the forewoman that a certain order must be rushed. He idled near Jean's machine for an interval, under pretence of examining her work, but he mainly looked her in the face. As he passed down the aisles, he touched this girl and that familiarly. Those so favored were without exception pretty, and they usually simpered under his attentions, though one or two grimaced afterward. When he had gone, Jean's thin-cheeked neighbor told her between coughs that this was the younger Meyer.
She met him again when she passed the offices in leaving for the night, and he again stared fixedly, wearing his repulsive, scarlet smile. She jumped at the conclusion that old Mr. Meyer had mentioned that she came from a reformatory, and hurried by with burning cheeks. The night air refreshed her a little, but the way home seemed endless, and the three flights from Mrs. St. Aubyn's door to the dormered bedroom were appalling in prospect. She entered faint with hunger and fagged with a thoroughness she had not known since the earlier days in the refuge laundry.
Amy sprang up from a novel.
"Don't say a word," she charged. "I suspicioned how it would be when you didn't show up for lunch. Not that I expected you, though. I'd have bet a pound of chocolates you wouldn't come."
Jean was content to say nothing and let herself be mothered. Amy showed no trace of fatigue. She had changed her black blouse for a white one of some soft fabric, and looked as fresh and pink-cheeked as if she had idled the live-long day.
"Now for the pick-me-up," she said briskly, after making Jean snug among the pillows; and what with a tiny kettle and a spirit-lamp, some sugar which she rummaged from a bureau drawer, and a little milk from the natural refrigerator of the window-sill, she concocted in no time a really savory cup of tea.
Then, only, Jean found voice.
"Did you know all the time," she demanded, "that Meyer & Schwarzschild's is no better than a sweat-shop?"
"I worked there a year," Amy returned sententiously. "I'm not saying it was as bad all along as now. It was as decent as any at first, and I hear that even now the room where the cutters work is pretty fair."
"Does Miss Archer know? But that's impossible."
"Of course she doesn't. And, though you mayn't believe it, old Mr. Meyer doesn't know either. You saw what he is! It's only hospitals and orphan asylums he thinks about. He totters down to business for about an hour a week, and if he ever pokes his dear old nose into one of the workrooms, it's early in the morning before the air gets so thick you could slice it."
"But his partner—Schwarzschild? Where is he?"
"Dead. They keep the name because the firm is an old one. It's all Meyer now, and that doesn't mean Jacob Meyer, Sr., but Jake. You probably saw Jake. He has tomato-colored lips and an affectionate disposition."
Jean shivered.
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"How could I? Everything was settled before I knew you were going there. Anyhow, it's a living while you are hunting something better. I'm in hopes to get you in where I am. I spoke to a floor-walker I know to-day. My department is full, but they'll probably need more help downstairs for the Christmas rush."
"That would be merely temporary."
"Most every place is temporary till they size you up. If you're what they want, they'll keep you on after the holidays, never fear. You may have to take less money to begin with than you get now, but it will be easier earned. Any old thing is better than Jake Meyer's joint,Ithink."
This hope carried Jean through the three ensuing days. The conditions at the cloak-factory were at no time better—in fact, once or twice, when it rained and the girls came with damp clothing, they were worse; but she omitted no more meals, and after the second day accustomed herself to the steady treadmill of the machine.
At luncheon, Friday, Amy had news.
"Come up to the store after you stop work to-night," she directed. "Beginning to-day, we keep open longer. Take the elevator to the fourth floor."
"There's a place for me?"
"I'm not saying that. I spoke to my friend, the floor-walker, again—he's in the toy department—and he told me to bring you round."
Jean found the vast establishment easily. The difficulty would have been to miss it. Pushing her way through the holiday shoppers crowding the immense ground-floor, she wormed into an elevator, got out as Amy bade, and, after devious wanderings in a wonderful garden of millinery, came finally upon her friend's special province and Amy herself.
Or was it Amy? She looked twice before deciding. It was not so much the costly garment, a thing of silks, embroideries, and laces, which effected the transformation,—Jean expected something of the kind,—as it was the actress in Amy herself, which impelled her to play the part the costume implied. With eyes sparkling, cheeks flushed, shoulders erect, she was not Amy Jeffries, cloak-model, but a child of luxury apparelled for the opera or the ball.
"Did she buy it?" Jean asked, when, free at last, Amy perceived her waiting and came to her.
Amy sighed dolefully.
"Yes; it's gone," she said. "You can't imagine how I hate to lose it. It had come to seem like my very own."
Jean could not conceive Amy in an occupation more congenial, and wished heartily that as enviable a fortune might fall to her.
"It seems easy work," she said. "What do they require of a cloak-model?"
"A thirty-six inch bust, at least, for a starter. Did I ever tell you that they call us by our bust measures? We never hear our own names. I'm Thirty-six; that big girl with the red hair is Thirty-eight; and so it goes. Then you must have good proportions and a stylish carriage, and be attractive generally," she added, naïvely regarding her trim reflection in the nearest pier-glass.
At this point "Thirty-eight" approached, and Amy introduced her, saying:—
"My friend here thinks she'd like to be a cloak-model. 'Tisn't all roses, is it?"
The red-haired girl gave the indulgent smile of experience.
"Wholesale or retail, it's harder than it looks," she declared. "I don't mean displaying gowns so much as the side issues. Why, the amount of dieting, lacing, and French heels some models put up with to keep in form is something awful. Give me the retail trade, though. I'd rather deal with shopping cranks than buyers."
"I suppose some of the buyers are fresh," Amy demurely remarked.
"Some!Better say one out of every two," retorted Thirty-eight, tersely. "I know what I'm talking about. I was a display model in wholesale houses for three years—showing evening costumes, too! Oh, I know buyers! A decent girl simply has to make herself a dummy, that's all. She can't afford to have eyes and ears and feelings."
It was now quite the closing hour, and Amy conducted Jean to a lower floor which looked like Kriss Kringle's own kingdom. They came upon the floor-walker, frowning portentously at an atom of a cash-girl who had stopped to play with a toy which she should have had wrapped immediately for a suburban customer; but he smoothed his wrinkled front at sight of Amy, with whom he seemed on excellent terms. Jean looked for a rigid inquiry into her qualifications, but after some mention of a reference, which Amy forestalled by glibly offering her own, Mr. Rose merely told her to report for trial Monday, at six dollars a week, remarking in the same breath that she had a heart-breaking pair of eyes.
Jean was puzzled.
"Do they take on everybody with no more ceremony than that?" she asked, as they made their way out. "It seems a slack way of doing things."
Amy laughed gayly.
"Not much! In some stores—most, I guess—the superintendent does the hiring. I had to face the manager of my department. You would have had to see the manager down here, probably, if he wasn't sick. I knew this when I struck Rosey-posy for the place. He took you as a personal favor to me, or that's what he said, for he's rushing me a bit. For my part, I think your heart-breaking eyes did it. You don't seem to realize it, but you're a mighty handsome girl. I didn't half appreciate it when you wore the refuge uniform. Don't blush! You'll get used to it. Trust the men to tell you. Anyhow, you've got your chance and can snap your fingers at Meyer & Schwarzschild."
"I'll tell them to-morrow morning."
"Better wait till to-morrow night after you've drawn your pay," counselled Amy, sagely. "Then you needn't listen to any more back talk than you please."
Jean followed this advice, giving the forewoman notice only when she turned from the cashier's window with her hard-earned wage safe in her grasp.
The Jewess bridled, her fat shoulders quivering.
"Place not good enough?" she queried tartly.
"I've a better one."
"With another cloak firm?"
"No; with a department store."
The forewoman smiled sarcastically.
"Don't you fool yourself that you'll be better off. Mr. Meyer! Mr. Meyer!" she called, raising her voice as the son of the house made his appearance in a doorway. "Here's another girl what's got the department-store fever."
Jean shrank from further explanations, particularly with young Meyer, but he bustled up at once and put the same questions as the forewoman.
"Which store is it?" he continued.
She told him, and wondered why he smirked.
"Does Amy Jeffries work there still?" he said.
"Yes."
"Seems to be prospering? Wears good clothes?"
"Yes."
Young Meyer leered again.
"Come round when you're sick of it," he invited. "Tell Amy, too. You're both good cloak-makers."
She turned from his satyr-face, vaguely disquieted. His whole manner was an evil innuendo. The girl with the freckles, who had called the place a sweat-shop, went down with her in the freight-elevator and walked beside her for a block, when they gained the street.
"I heard Jake chewin' the rag up there," she said. "Why didn't you cuff his ears? Anybody'd know to look at you that no buyer got youyourposition."
"What are you talking about?"
"You didn't catch on to what he was hintin'?"
"No."
The girl gave an incredulous exclamation.
"And maybe you don't know either how Amy Jeffries got her place?" she added.
"She said a buyer for the firm saw her at Meyer & Schwarzschild's and liked her looks."
"That's straight," grinned the sceptic.
Jean shook her impatiently by the arm.
"Whatisn'tstraight?" she demanded. "You are the one hinting now. What do you mean? Out with it!"
But the girl squirmed out of her grasp and darted laughing away.
"Ask Amy," she called.
XI
Jean meant to probe the mystery at the first possible moment, but her resolve weakened in Amy's presence. If the girl's light-heartedness did not of itself quiet suspicion, it at least disarmed it, while her unselfish joy at Jean's release from the thraldom of Meyer & Schwarzschild alone made the questions Jean had thought to put seem churlish and ungrateful. Moreover, Amy was full of a plan for the evening.
"I knew it was coming," she exulted. "Anybody with a pair of eyes could see by the way he's picked you out to talk to every night that you've got him going. He came to me first to ask if I thought you'd come, and when I accepted for both, he hustled right out to get the tickets."
"What tickets?" She did not ask who was the purchaser; she, too, had eyes.
"Tickets for the theatre—a vaudeville show."
Jean's face lit.
"Vaudeville! I've often wondered what it was like."
"You're not telling me you've never seen a vaudeville show?"
"Never. Nothing worth seeing ever came to Shawnee Springs. Ought we to go?"
"Do you mean, is it respectable? Sure! One of the best in the city."
"I don't mean that. Ought we to go in this way? I don't know him."
"Well, I do," rejoined Amy, decisively; "and if there's a nicer fellow between High Bridge and the Battery, I'll miss my guess. Of course, if you want to scare up a headache and back out, why, you can. I'm going, anyway, and I reckon the extra ticket won't go a-begging. The stenographer or the manicure would jump at the chance."
"Would he be offended?"
"Awfully. Why, he only asked me because he wanted you! Next time it will be you alone."
Jean needed little coaxing. She wanted exceedingly to see a New York theater, and she really liked the breezy young dentist. It had surprised her in their evening talks to find how much they had in common. He, too, had spent his youth in a country town, and, though he had migrated first to a smaller city to study for his profession, his early impressions of New York coincided very closely with her own. She later discovered the same community of interest with nearly every one so reared, but it now chanced that none other of Mrs. St. Aubyn's boarders—or, as she preferred to call them, guests—were country-bred, and Paul Bartlett got the credit of a readier sympathy accordingly. Thus, to-night, he did not share Amy's rather too frequently expressed wonder that Jean had never witnessed a vaudeville performance.
"Never saw anything nearer to it than a minstrel show myself, up to the time I went away to dental college," he confessed frankly, as they set out. "We only got 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' and 'East Lynne' troupes in our burg. Say, but they were a rocky aggregation! I could see that even then."
This also struck Jean as a notable coincidence.
"It seems as if you were describing the Springs," she said. "But we did get a circus or two."
"Then your town beat mine," Paul laughed. "We had to jog over to the county seat for Barnum's. Otherwise they seem to have been cut off the same piece of homespun. I'll bet you even had box socials?"
Jean's face suddenly lost its animation.
"Yes," she answered.
"Just about the limit, weren't they? I wonder Newport doesn't take 'em up. They're foolish enough. Yet I thought they were great sport once. I used to try to change the boxes when I suspected that some love-sick pair were scheming to beat the game. Maybe you've done that, too?"
"Yes," Jean assented again unsteadily.
She was infuriated with herself for her involuntary change of manner and burning face, neither of which, she feared, had escaped his quick eye. It galled her thoroughgoing honesty to be forever on her guard against disclosing her refuge history, yet there seemed no help for it. Unjust though it was, the stigma was as actual for her as for the guiltiest, and cloak it she must.
If the dentist noticed anything amiss, he was tactful and launched into an exchange of nonsense with Amy which lasted quite to the theater's garish door. Once within, Jean forgot that she had a past which might not be fearlessly bared for any eye. Amy squeezed her arm happily as they passed directly into the body of the house instead of mounting the stairs familiar to her feet when she paid her own way; and to the squeeze she added a look of transport and awe when, following the usher, they skirted the orchestra and entered a narrow passage near the stage.
"We've gotboxseats!" she whispered huskily. "They couldn't have cost him less than a dollar apiece!"
Jean had a moment of timidity begotten of a vivid recollection of two cramped pigeon-roosts, always untenanted, which flanked the advertisement-littered drop-curtain of the Shawnee Springs Grand Opera House, but was speedily reassured to find that she need endure no such lonely distinction here. These boxes were many, and they held many, their own being shared by half a dozen persons besides themselves, while the hangings were so disposed that she could be as secluded as she pleased, yet miss nothing of the play.
The play! It was a series of plays, with endless other wonderful things, too. Nothing that she had conceived resembled this ever-shifting spectacle of laughter and tears. For there were tears—real ones! Jean had often jeered at girls who cried over novels, while those whom a play, or at least the Shawnee Springs brand of drama, could move to tears, were even less comprehensible; yet to-night, when a simple little piece dealing merely with an unhappy man and wife who, resolved to go their separate ways, callously divided their poor belongings until they reached a dead baby's shoes, ran its course, she found her breath short and her cheeks wet. She was at first rather ashamed of this weakness, attributing it to her refuge nerves, but she presently heard Amy sob, and, looking round, perceived handkerchiefs fluttering throughout the darkened house. Paul, on her other side, hemmed once or twice, and she supposed him disgusted with all this ado over a baby who never existed, but when the lights went up suddenly she discovered that his eyes were moist, too.
She liked this trait in Paul. She was glad, furthermore, that he did not scoff afterward, as did some men whom the acting had moved. It seemed to her a wholesome sign that he had the courage of his sympathies; one could probably rely upon that type of man. His mental alertness also impressed her anew. For him none of the quips of the Irish or German comedians were recondite, and he could explain in a nutshell the most bewildering feats of the Japanese adepts at sleight of hand. She wondered not a little at this special knowledge, and when they left the theatre he told her that it had been his chief boyish ambition to become a magician.
"I drummed up subscriptions, collected bones, old iron, and rubber for the tinman, peddled anything under the canopy that folks would buy, all for the sake of a little cash to get books and apparatus," he confessed. "Once, when I was about smart sixteen, I gave an exhibition, part magic lantern, part magic tommyrot. I hired the village hall, mind you. What cheek I had those days!"
Jean was keenly interested. This, too, reminded her of the Springs and her own irrevocable playtime.
"Did people turn out?" she asked.
"Did they! I cleared twelve dollars."
"My!" jeered Amy. "I suppose you bought an automobile?"
"No; they hadn't been invented yet." He turned again to Jean. "Guess what I did buy!"
"More apparatus."
"Just as quick as I could get a money-order," he laughed. "You're something of a wizard yourself. You must have been a boy once upon a time."
"Yes," said Jean; "I was."
When they reached the street Paul suggested oysters, and after a faint demurrer from Jean, which a secret pinch from Amy abruptly quenched, he led the way to a restaurant. The establishment he chose had a German name, and was fitted up in a manner which Jean took to be German also. The chairs and tables were of a heavy medieval design, and matched the high paneling which surrounded the room and terminated in a shelf bearing a curious array of mugs and flagons. From a small dais in one corner an orchestra, made up of a zither, two mandolins, and a guitar, discoursed a wiry yet not unpleasant music which seemed, on the whole, less Teuton than American, of a most unclassical bounce and joyousness. Paul apologized for this flaw in an otherwise harmonious scheme, explaining that the American patrons outnumbered the German, but Amy patriotically declared that ragtime was better than foreign music any day, and pronounced the entire place as cute as it could be, which really left nothing else to be said.
Everybody was drinking beer with his food, or, speaking more accurately, eating a little food with his beer, and Paul ordered two or three bottles of the exceedingly dark variety most in vogue, which he and Amy consumed. Amy rallied Jean upon her abstinence, and asked if she had signed the pledge; but Paul seemed to respect her scruples.
"Felt the same way myself once," he said. "Whenever the good old scandal specialists up our way saw a fellow slide into the hotel on a hot day for a glass of lager, they thought he was piking straight for the eternal bonfire. Naturally the boys punished a lot of stuff they didn't want, just to live up to their reputations. It's some different down here."
"I should say so," agreed Amy, boisterously. "Why, my stepfather began to send me out for beer almost as soon as I could walk. The idea of its hurting anybody! I don't believe I'd feel it if I drank a keg."
Paul did not seem as impressed by this statement as were an after-theater party at an adjoining table, and embraced a quiet opportunity to move an unfinished bottle out of her enthusiastic reach. Jean glowed under the scrutiny of the supper-party opposite, and, exchanging a look with Paul, rose presently to go. Amy objected eloquently, pointing out that it still wanted half an hour of midnight and that department stores did no business Sundays, together with sundry arguments as trenchant, which plainly carried weight with the attentive tables roundabout, but failed to convince her companions. Near the door she fell in with an unexpected ally in the person of Mr. Rose, who listened to her protests quite as sympathetically as if they had not already reached him across the room, and promptly invited them all to what he termed a nightcap with himself. Jean declined civilly, and Amy, though sore tempted, followed her example. Once outside, however, she asserted her perfect independence by walking off with Mr. Rose on his remarking easily that he would stroll their way.
"Aching incisors!" ejaculated the dentist, grimly watching them forge ahead. "Where did I get the foolish idea that I was her escort? Who is that flower, anyhow?"
"An employee in our store."
"Oh!" said Paul. "Clerk?"
"No; a floor-walker."
"Oh!" he said again, with a change of intonation which Jean detected. "In her department?"
"No; in mine."
"Oh!"
Amy's laugh came back shrilly through the now sparsely frequented street.
"I shouldn't have ordered so much beer," admitted the man. "It was too heavy for her, even if her stepfather—but let's cut that out!"
Jean herself thought that this passage from the Jeffries family history might better be left undiscussed. She quickened their pace till they were close upon Amy's too buoyant heels, and so continued to their door.
Amy was full of regrets that she could not at this hour with propriety ask Mr. Rose into Mrs. St. Aubyn's drawing-room, and as Paul inhospitably neglected to offer his quarters, the floor-walker, with unflagging cordiality and self-possession, took himself off.
"I don't cotton to Mr. Rose," said the dentist, in a voice too low for Amy, who was already mounting the stairs. "I hope you don't."
"I don't know him."
"You don't want to know him, take my word for it. This isn't sour grapes because he butted in, mind you. If you knew the city, I wouldn't say a word."
Jean bent a frank gaze upon him under the dim hall light. Paul met it to her satisfaction.
"Thank you for to-night," she said, giving him her hand. "Thank you for all of it; for the theater and the supper and for—this."
Explanations with Amy were impossible now, but the following morning, which the girls spent luxuriously in bed, proved auspicious. Amy's waking mood was contrite. She owned of her own engaging accord that she had made a goose of herself in the restaurant, suggesting by way of defence that her stepfather must have favored quite another kind of beer. She as frankly conceded that the Rose episode was indefensible, and promised ample apologies to the dentist.
"He'll understand how it was," she said. "Paul's not a Jake Meyer."
"Will Mr. Rose understand?" asked Jean, pointedly.
Amy shot her a sidelong glance.
"Why not?"
"He's not—well, a Paul Bartlett."
"He isn't a Jake Meyer, either, if that's what you mean," retorted Amy, rising on her elbow. "I like Rosey and make no bones of telling you. What have you got at the back of your big brown eyes there? Somebody has been stuffing you, I guess. Was it some kind friend at Meyer & Schwarzschild's? What did they say about Rosey and me?"
"Nothing," answered Jean, suspicious of her warmth; but now told her plainly whom and what they had mentioned.
Amy listened without surprise.
"There was bound to be some gossip," she commented, at length. "I counted on it."
"You counted on it!"
"Certainly. Jake knew the buyer's record from A to Z, and there were others."
Jean had a moment's giddiness, and shrank from her explorations.
"Did you?" she faltered.
"Of course. Do you suppose I couldn't read him like a book after all I've been through?"
"Yet you went just the same! You—"
"I trusted to luck, and for once luck was with me. He had a big offer from a Chicago firm, and left town the very day I went into the cloak department. Oh, you needn't stare," she added, with a touch of passion. "The world hasn't been any too kind to me, and I'm learning to beat it at its own selfish game. Don't let it worry you."
"I can't help it."
"Then you're silly. I'm not as soft as I look. Besides, you'll find yourself pretty busy paddling your own canoe."
Jean fell into a brooding silence. The new life was incredibly complex. It held possibilities before which imagination flinched. A picture, recalled again and again with extraordinary vividness, flashed once more before her. She saw a camp among birches bordering a pellucid lake; a boyish, pacing figure; a straightforward, troubled face confronting her own. She evoked a voice, "To be a stranger in New York, homeless, friendless, without work, the shadow of that place over there dogging your steps...." Every syllable, every intonation, was ineffaceable. Where was he now, that flawless young knight of the enchanted forest, who had stayed her folly and changed the current of her life? He had promised to befriend her when, against his counsel, she had thought to dare this unknown world. Would he still have faith, should they meet?
Amy's laugh caught her back to the room of three dormers.
"You looked a million miles away," she said. "If you were another sort of girl, I'd say you were dreaming of your best fellow. What! Blushes! Then you were? Was it Paul?"
"Paul!" Jean repelled the suggestion with a pillow. "Take that!"
They said no more of the buyer—he was luckily out of the reckoning; and although Jean deemed the dentist a wiser judge of men in general, and of floor-walkers in particular, than Amy, she decided for the present to side with neither, but try to weigh Mr. Rose for herself. If Amy was skimming thin ice, she was at least a practiced skater, with the chastening memory of a serious splash. Moreover, to recur to Amy's metaphor, she had a canoe of her own to paddle, as she was roughly reminded that same afternoon.
XII
It happened at dusk while they were returning from Central Park, which Amy had selected as a primary lesson in Jean's civic education. They were homing by way of Broadway, and were well back into the theatrical section, when Jean's guide gripped her abruptly by the arm, dragged her into the nearest doorway, and hurried her half up the dark flight of stairs to which it led. Even here she enjoined silence, pointing for explanation to the square of pavement framed by the doorway, into which an instant later loitered the bedizened key to the riddle—Stella Wilkes.
There was no mistaking her. For an interminable interval she lingered, watchful of the street, so distinct under the electrics that they could even make out her mole. Then, aimlessly as she had come, she drifted out again and away.
"Thank my stars I saw her first that time!" gasped Amy, still fearfully intent upon the lighted square.
"You knew she was in New York?"
"Yes. I've seen her before. She came up to me one night looking even worse than now. She was more painted, and her eyes were like burned holes. She said she was broke, but had the promise of a place. It was to sing in some gin-mill, I think. Shecansing, you know. Remember how she'd let her voice go in chapel, just to show off? I loaned her a dollar to get rid of her. I was afraid somebody I knew might see us together. I think she saw I was afraid."
"You shouldn't have let her see; it gives her a hold on you. I shan't dodge."
Jean began consistently to descend, but Amy caught her back.
"Wait," she pleaded. "Do wait a little longer. Wait for my sake, if you don't care yourself. But you'd better fight shy of her, too, I can tell you. She hasn't forgotten the prison riot. She mentioned it the night I saw her, and said she'd get plenty square with you yet."
Tricked by her uncertain nerves, Jean came under the sway of Amy's panic. They lurked cowering in the hallway till sure of a clear coast; then, darting forth, hurried round the first corner to a quieter thoroughfare which Stella would be less apt to haunt. Here, too, they continually saw her in imagination, and sought other doorways and rounded other corners for safety. Fear tracked them home, plucked at them in their own street, mounted their own steps, entered their own door, and abode with them thereafter.
Nor, for one of them at least, did the crowded weeks next following bring forgetfulness or reassurance. Jean was ever expecting the dreaded face to leer at her from the blurred horde which swam daily by the little island in the toy department, where she sold children's games. While she elucidated the mysteries of parchesi or dissected maps to some distraught mother of six, another part of the restless mechanism of her brain was painting Stella to the life. She pictured the outcast's vindictive joy at running her down, heard her mouth the unspeakable for all who would lend an ear. And who would not! She quailed in fancy before the gaping audience—the curious shoppers, the round-eyed cash-girls, the smirking clerks, Mr. Rose, the floor-walker.
Once, issuing from such a dream, she found herself face to face with Mr. Rose, who had come unnoticed to her counter, and so clear-cut was the vision, she merged the unreal with the real and blenched at his voice.
"Not taking morphine lunches, are you?" he asked, leaning solicitously over the counter.
She stared hazily till he repeated his question.
"Morphine lunches! What are they?"
The man enacted the pantomime of applying a hypodermic syringe to his arm.
"So," he said. "Some of the girls who can't lunch at home get into the way of it. Bad thing—very."
"Why should you suspect me of such a thing?" demanded Jean, indignantly. "Do I look like a morphine-fiend?"
"No offence intended. Noticed a queer look in your eyes, that's all. Stunning eyes! I'd hate to see 'em full of dope. Perfectly friendly interest, understand."
She welcomed the fretful interruption of a customer, but the woman was only returning some article, not buying, and the transaction required the floor-walker's sanction. When the shopper had gone her way, he leaned to Jean again.
"If it's worry about holding your place after the holidays," he said, "why, you can't quit it too soon. We've watched your work, and it's all right. The forelady says you've learned the stock quicker than any green clerk she's had in a dog's age, and you know she's particular. Whoever else goes, you stick."
Jean gave a long breath of thankfulness, but she was not too happy to be practical.
"And the pay?" she asked.
"The same for the present. You're still a beginner, you know."
"It is very little. The girl who had my place left because she could not live on it, I hear."
Mr. Rose tapped his prominent teeth with a pencil.
"She said something of the kind to me," he admitted. "She was unreasonable—very. What could she expect of six dollars?"
The handsome saleswoman at the dolls' furniture counter was intoning, "Oh, Mr. Rose! Oh, Mr. Rose!" with increasing petulance, and the floor-walker sped to her, leaving his cryptic utterance unexplained. Jean asked a fellow-clerk more about her predecessor, and learned that as she lived somewhere in the Bronx, both carfare and lunches had been serious items. These, fortunately, she herself need not consider. It was half the battle to feel permanent. She could shift somehow on her present wage till promotion came.
There was, moreover, a certain compensation in feeling herself a factor in this great establishment which everybody knew who had heard of New York at all. It was a show place of the metropolis, one of the seventy times seven wonders of the New World. Its floor space was reckoned in acres, its roof housed a whole city block, its capital represented millions, its wares the habitable globe. Nothing essential to human life seemed to be lacking. There were scales for your exalted babyship's earthly advent; patent foods, healing drugs, mechanical playthings for your childish wants or ills; text-books for your growing mind; fine feathers for your expanding social wings; the trousseau for your marriage; furnishings from cellar to attic for your first housekeeping; a bank for your savings; fittings for your office; the postal service, the telegraph, the telephone, lest business suffer while you shop; bronzes, carvings, automobiles, steam yachts, old wines, old books, old masters for your topping prosperity; comforts innumerable—oculists, dentists, discreet photographers, what not—for your lean and slippered decline; and, yes, even the sad few vanities you may take with you to your quiet grave.
It drew rich and poor alike these days, and sooner or later the toy department gathered them in. Though Stella came not, there were many of familiar aspect who did. Hardly a day passed without its greeting from some one Jean knew. Mrs. St. Aubyn came shopping on account of an incredible grandchild she must remember; the bookworm for the cogent reason that a cherubic niece brought him; the birds of passage to celebrate an engagement obtained at last; the shorn lambs of Wall Street to revive fading memories of a full pocketbook; the stenographer and the manicure since they were women; the dentist because of Jean.
It was impossible to mistake Paul's reason. Her fellow-clerks hinted it, Mr. Rose reënforced their opinion with his own, Amy added embroidered comment, and finally Paul told her explicitly himself. On the first evening, when he appeared at her counter near the closing hour, he bought a game. At his second call, a week later, he examined at length, but did not purchase. The third time he said that he had happened by; the fourth he cast subterfuge to the winds and avowed frankly that he came to walk home with her.
"Fact is, I'm lonesome," he explained, when they reached the street. "Till you came I never got a chance to talk to the right sort of girl except in the operating-chair, and that didn't cut much ice, for it was always about teeth. Hope you don't mind my dropping round for you once in a while after office hours? It will keep these street-corner mashers away from you and do a lot toward civilizing me."
Jean accepted his companionship as frankly as it was tendered. There was nothing loverlike about Paul's attitude. He was precisely the same whether they walked alone or whether, as frequently happened, Amy came down with her to the employees' entrance, where Jean had suggested that they meet. His escort was doubly welcome during the last week before Christmas when the great store kept open evenings, and the shopping quarter held its nightly jam. Then, perhaps a fortnight after the holidays, she overheard a conversation.
It was not about herself, nor among girls she knew, nor indeed in her department; merely a scrap of waspish dispute between two young persons of free speech who supposed themselves in sole possession of the cloak-room. Black Eyes remarked that she knew very well what Blue Eyes was. She didn't belong there; her place was the East Side. Whereupon Blue Eyes elegantly retorted that unless Black Eyes shut her mouth, she would smash her ugly face in. This was evidently purely rhetorical, for when Black Eyes waxed yet more personal, pointing out the inconsistent relation of fifteen-dollar picture hats to six dollars a week, with pertinent reference to a bald floor-walker from the carpet department who waited for Blue Eyes every night, the only act of violence was the slamming of a door which covered Blue Eyes's swift retreat.
That evening Jean told the dentist he must come no more.
"Suffering bicuspid!" he gasped. "What haveIdone?" This despite her tactful best to assure him that he had done nothing at all.
It seemed enormously difficult of explanation at first, but when she suggested that she found the department store not unlike a small town for gossip, he comprehended instantly.
"Who has been talking?" he demanded. "If it was that pup of a floor-walker—"
"It wasn't. So far as I know, not a soul has mentioned my name. It's because they mustn't talk, that I've spoken."
Paul squared a by no means puny pair of shoulders.
"Let me catch 'em at it!" he said.
She was more watchful of her fellow-clerks thereafter. A few girls she doubted, but striking an average, they seemed as a class honest, hard-working, and monotonously commonplace, with their loftiest ambitions centered upon tawdry and impracticable clothes. If a girl dressed better than her wage warranted, as many did, it usually developed that she lived with her parents or with other relations who gave her cheap board. These lucky beings had also a social existence denied to the wholly self-supporting, of which Jean obtained a perhaps typical glimpse through a vivacious little rattlepate at the adjoining mechanical-toy counter, with whom friendly overtures between customers led to the discovery that they were neighbors, and to a call at the three dormers. This courtesy Jean in due course returned one evening, at the paternal flat over an Eighth Avenue grocery, where "Flo," as she petitioned to be called, rejoiced in the exclusive possession of a small bedroom ventilated, though scarcely illumined, by an air-shaft.
"Mother gave me this room to myself when I began to bring in money," she explained. "I only have to hand over two dollars a week. What's left I spend just as I please. Father says I buy more clothes than the rest of the family put together, and he nearly threw a fit once when I paid twelve dollars for a lace hat trimmed with imported flowers; but all the same he doesn't like to see any of the girls I go with look better than I do. Our crowd is great for dress. How do you like my cozy corner? I think these wire racks for photographs are sweet, don't you? I have such a stack of fellows' pictures! I wonder if you know any of them. The man in the dress suit is Willy Larkin—he's in the gents' furnishing department. I put him next to Dan Evans—you know Dan, don't you?—because they're so tearing jealous of each other. If Dan takes me to a Sousa concert one night, Willy can't rest till he has spread himself on vaudeville or some exciting play. They almost came to blows over a two-step I promised both of them at the subscription hop our dancing club gave New Year's. That tintype you're looking at is one Charlie Simmons and I had taken at Glen Island last year. Goodness! Don't holdmyface to the light. I'm a fright in a bathing-suit. I do love bathing, though, but I think salt water is packs more fun. Last summer I had enough saved for a whole week at a dandy beach near Far Rock-away. There was a grand dancing pavilion, and sometimes you could hear the waves above the band. I just love the sea!"
Jean was not envious, but the girl's chatter made her own existence outside the store seem humdrum. Mrs. St. Aubyn's circle was more narrow than had at first appeared. After a few dinners, it was obvious that the landlady's talk was nearly always confined to the food and servants, as the librarian's was limited to the weather, the shorn lambs' to things financial, and the stenographer's, the manicure's, and Amy's to feminine styles, while the birds of passage, whose side-lights upon the Profession had been diverting, were now lamentably displaced by an insurance agent who dwelt overmuch upon the uncertainty of human life. It had to be admitted, also, that Paul himself talked shop with frequency. His stories, like his droll ejaculations, were apt to smack of the office; and he had a habit of carrying gold crowns or specimens of bridgework in his pockets, which, though no doubt works of art of their kind, were yet often disconcerting when shown in mixed company. At such times especially, Jean would evoke that knightlier figure, who shone so faultless in perspective, and in fancy put him in Paul's place.
She perceived the dentist's foibles, however, without liking the essential man one whit the less, and, in the absence of the Ideal, frequently took Sunday trolley trips with him in lieu of the tabooed walks from the store; but the fear of meeting Stella made her decline his invitations to the theater and kept her from the streets at night. Paul took these self-denials for maiden scruples beyond his masculine comprehension, and was edified rather than offended; but he was at first puzzled and then hurt, when, as spring drew on, the outings also ceased. Jean was evasive when questioned, while Amy looked knowing, but was too loyal to explain. The stenographer or the manicure or, for that matter, any normal woman could, if asked, have told him that Jean was merely ashamed of her clothes.
It was largely because Paul misunderstood that Jean resolved no longer to wait passively for promotion. Six dollars a week had their limitations, since five went always to Mrs. St. Aubyn for board. Yet, out of that scant margin of a sixth, she had somehow scraped together enough to replace what she had used of Mrs. Fanshaw's grudging contribution, the whole of which she despatched to Shawnee Springs in a glow of wrathful satisfaction that cheered her for many days. Nevertheless, the want of it pinched her shrewdly. Those ten dollars would have helped spare the refuge suit, which, fortunately black, did duty seven days in the week and looked it, too, now that the mild days began to outnumber the raw, and other girls bloomed in premature spring finery. Many of the bargains which the great store was forever advertising would have aided in little ways, but the management was opposed to its employees' profiting by these chances.
During the continued ill health of the department manager, Mr. Rose still wielded an extended authority, and to him, accordingly, Jean made her appeal, overtaking him on his way to the offices one evening when the immense staff was everywhere hurrying from the building. The carpet and upholstery department, where they talked, was ever a place of muffled quiet, even with business at high tide, and, save for an occasional night-watchman, they seemed isolated now. Rose heard her out, lounging with feline complacency upon a soft-hued heap of Oriental rugs, while his eyes roamed her eager face with candid approval.
Jean saw with anger that he no longer attended.
"You are not listening," she reproached. "Can't you appreciate what this means to me? Look at my shoes! They're all I have. Look at this suit! It's my only one. I've saved no money to buy other clothes—it's impossible. You say I'm efficient—pay me living wages, then. I can't live on what you give me. I've tried and I've failed—failed like the girl before me."
The floor-walker slid smiling from the rug pile.
"She was inconceivably plain," he said; "but you—" He spread his white hands in futile search of adjectives.
"Never mind my looks, Mr. Rose," Jean struck in curtly. "I am talking business."
"So am I, my dear. I'm pointing out your resources."
She did not take his meaning fully, his leer notwithstanding, and he drew his own interpretation of her silence.
"You know we don't lack for applicants here," he continued. "There are a dozen girls waiting to jump into your shoes. We expect our low-paid girls to have additional means of support. Some of them have families; others—but you're no fool. There are plenty of men who'd be glad to help you out. Why don't you arrange things with that young dentist? Or"—his smile grew more saccharine—"if that affair is off, perhaps I—"
Then something transpired which he never clearly understood. It was plain enough to Jean. In the twinkling of an eye she was again an athletic boxing tomboy, answering to the name of Jack, before whose scientific "right" Mr. Rose dropped with crumpled petals to the floor.
XIII
Jean stood over him an instant, her anger still at white heat, but the floor-walker had had enough of argument and only groveled cursing where he fell. Leaving him without a word, she swept by a grinning night-watchman and turned in at the adjacent offices, whither Rose himself was bound. She had learned the ways of the place sufficiently by now to know that members of the firm often lingered here after the army which served them had gone, and she was determined that her own story should reach them first. But the office of the head of the firm was dark, and the consequential voice which answered her knock at the door of a junior partner, where a light still shone, proved to be that of a belated stenographer.
As she turned uncertainly away, Rose, nursing a swelling eye, again confronted her.
"Thought you'd take it to headquarters, did you?" he said. "I advise you to drop it right here."
He recoiled as she advanced, and warded an imaginary blow, but she only passed him by contemptuously.
"Are you going to drop it?" he asked, following to the stairs. "I don't want to see you get into trouble, for all your nasty temper. I'm willing to overlook your striking me."
His persistence only fixed her resolution to expose him, and she hurried on without reply.
"Two can play at that game," he warned over the rail.
In the street she paused irresolutely. The man would, of course, protect himself if he could, and her own story should reach some member of the firm to-night. If she waited till morning, Rose could easily forestall her. Yet she had become too sophisticated not to shrink from the idea of trying to take her grievance into one of those men's homes. Only the other day she had picked up a trashy paper containing a shop-girl story, warmly praised by Amy, which narrated an incident of the kind. The son and heir of a merchant prince—so the author styled him—had cruelly wronged the beautiful shop-girl, who, after harrowing sorrows, took her courage in her hands and braved the ancestral hall. She gained an entrance somehow (details were scanty here) and confronted the base son and heir at the climax of a grand ball at which the upper ten and other numerals were assembled to do honor to his chosen bride. Jean had seen the absurdity of the picture as Amy could not. Things did not fall out this wise in real life. The beautiful shop-girl would never have gotten by the merchant prince's presumably well-trained servants, even if she had eluded the specially detailed policeman at the awning, and Jean judged that her own chances would be as slender.
Nevertheless, there seemed to be nothing left her but to try. She consulted a directory in the next drugstore and copied out the home addresses of the several members of the firm. One of the junior partners seemed to live nearest, though not within walking distance, and at this address she finally arrived at an hour when, judging Fifth Avenue by Mrs. St. Aubyn's, she feared she would find her employer at dinner. She recognized the house as one which Amy had pointed out with an air of proprietorship on their first Sunday walk, and she reflected with misgiving that it was a really plausible setting for the drama of the beautiful shop-girl, did such things exist.
An elderly butler convinced her that this was her own drama. He was not unbearably haughty, a vast quantity of polite fiction to the contrary; and if he scorned her clothes, he did not let the fact appear. His manner even suggested decorous regret that the master of the house was not at home. Jean went down the steps, wondering whether this were an artistic lie, but, happily for the servant's reputation, an electric cab at this moment drew up at the curb and dropped the man she sought. She recognized him at once, for of all the firm he had the most striking presence, looking very like the more jovial portraits of Henry VIII. Unlike the Tudor king, however, he was said to be happily married and of domestic tastes. He paused, giving her a keen look, when he perceived that she meant to accost him.
"I just asked for you." Jean said. "I wanted to speak to you about something at the store."
"You are one of our employees?"
"Yes. I am a sales girl in the toy department. I wish to make a serious complaint."
"A complaint? Your own department is the proper channel for that."
"I cannot ask the man to judge himself," returned Jean, simply.
He gave her another sharp look.
"Oh," he said, with a change of tone. "Come in." Then, to the elderly butler, who during this interval had held the door ajar with an air of not listening, "The Study."
Jean seemed to recall that the beautiful shop-girl had encountered a "study," which could have been no more luxurious than this. She queried, while she waited, what the library and more pretentious apartments could be like. The room seemed to her of regal splendor. It was paneled and cross-beamed, and a fireplace in keeping with the architecture well-nigh filled one end wall. The light fell from a wonderful affair of opalescent glass which gave new tones to the oriental fabrics underfoot and added richness to the lavishly employed mahogany. No other wood had been permitted here. It glowed dully from beam, panel, and cornice; from the mantel, the bookshelves, the carved cabinet concealing a safe; from the massive griffin-legged desk at which the owner of it all, as florid as his taste, presently took his seat.
"Now, then," he said, "tell me explicitly what you charge."
She omitted nothing. Her listener followed her closely and once, when she gave Rose's version of the firm's policy, he shook his head dissentingly, but whether in disbelief of herself or in condemnation of the floor-walker, she could not guess.
"This is a grave accusation," he said, when she had done. "It involves not only Mr. Rose,—who, let me say, has always been most efficient,—but the good name of the whole establishment."
"That is one reason why I came."
"Of the whole establishment," repeated the junior partner, as if she had not spoken. "Was there a third party present?"
"There was a watchman near by, but he couldn't have heard what was said."
"You are quite sure you did not misunderstand Mr. Rose?"
"Quite."
"And were not prejudiced against him in advance? Floor-walkers as a class have often been maligned."
Jean reflected carefully.
"I can't say no to that," she owned frankly. "A friend had a poor opinion of him and said so before I began work, but I tried not to let that influence me."
"But it did?"
"A little, perhaps. I admit I've never liked him."
For a time the big man under the drop-light trifled absently with a paper-knife.
"We'll take this matter up, of course," he said presently. "If we need a housecleaning, we'll have it; but I can't believe that things are radically at fault. No department store in the city is more considerate of its people. We were among the first to close Saturday afternoons in midsummer; we offer liberal inducements for special energy during the holidays; we have provided exceedingly attractive lunch-rooms; we even hope, when trade conditions permit, to introduce a form of profit sharing. What more can we do?"
Jean supposed his rhetorical query personal.
"You might pay better wages," she suggested. "Then things like this wouldn't happen."
For the fraction of a second King Henry wore one of his less amiable expressions. It suggested beheading or long confinement in the Tower. Then, immediately, it was glossed by modernity.
"There you trench upon economic grounds," he rejoined heavily. "I wish we might inaugurate a lecture course for our employees, to elucidate the principles which govern a great business. The law of supply and demand, the press of competition, the necessity for costly advertising, these and countless other considerations, which we at the helm appreciate, never enter the shop-girl's head."
Jean was overborne by these impressive phrases. They had never entered her head, certainly, and she was not altogether sure why they should.
"We only ask a living," she said.
"But you shouldn't. We want the girl who asks pin-money, the girl who lives with her family. Have you no family yourself, by the way?"
"My mother is living."
"Is she dependent upon you in any way?"
"No."
"Is she able to provide for you?"
"Perfectly."
"Then why doesn't she?"
Jean's eyes snapped.
"Because I won't let her."
Her listener shrugged.
"The modern woman!" he lamented. "But this is beside the question. We pay as others pay. If a girl thinks it insufficient, let her find other work. So far, I uphold Mr. Rose. His further advice—as you report it—is another matter. As I have said, we will take it up."
He touched a bell and rose, and Jean followed the elderly servant to the door. The impetus which had brought her here had subsided into great weariness of body and spirit, but she went down the avenue not ill satisfied. She had had her hearing. She had spoken, not for herself alone, but in a measure for others. Moreover, the man's bluff candor seemed an earnest that justice would be done. Precisely what form justice would take, she did not speculate.
Near her own door she met Paul on anxious lookout for her.
"I was beginning to imagine a fine bunch of horrors," he said. "Amy hadn't a ghost of a notion what was up."
"I did not tell Amy I should be late," Jean replied. She offered no explanations, but Paul's concern was grateful after what she had undergone, and she added, "I'm sorry you worried."
He eyed her narrowly, pausing an instant at the steps.
"Any need for a man of my build?" he inquired.
"Why do you ask that?"
"Because I think you're in trouble. If I can help—"
"No, no," she returned hastily. "But thank you."
"Something has happened?"
"Yes; at the store. I can't very well explain it."
"Oh," said Paul, as if explanations were needless. "I'm not so sure I couldn't be useful."
She felt that he divined something of what had transpired, his knowledge of the floor-walker being perhaps fuller than her own, but he said no more. Jean was singularly comforted by his attitude, especially since Amy's, as presently defined, left much to be desired. She seemed less amazed at Rose's behavior than at Jean's active resentment.
"I wouldn't have struck him," she said.
"What would you have done?"
"I—I don't know. At any rate, not that. A girl has to put up with a lot."
"I presume you wouldn't have reported him, either?" Jean flung out bitterly.
"No; I didn't—I mean I wouldn't."
Jean started.
"I think you meant just what you said first, Amy," she cried. "Has he told you the same thing?"
Amy writhed.
"N-no," she began; "that is—"
"Almost, then?"
"Yes."
"And you did nothing?"
"I didn't dare do anything. I don't see how you dared. It's too big a risk."
"I would have risked more in keeping quiet. I simply had to take it higher up."
"But you said Mr. Rose offered to let it drop," Amy timidly reminded. "You could have done that."
"That!" She had no words to voice her scorn.
They went to bed and rose again in an atmosphere of constraint, and Jean walked to her day's work alone. She dreaded meeting Rose, and apprehended another interview with the junior partner, an ordeal which wore a more forbidding aspect by day. But neither happened. The floor-walker did not appear in the toy department at all, though some one had seen him enter the building. It was rumored that he was ill.
Toward the end of the afternoon Jean noticed that she had become an object of some interest to the forewoman, and wondered hopefully if this influential personage had marked her for promotion. Her pay-envelope, for it was Saturday, shortly furnished a clew to the mystery in the shape of a neat slip informing her that her services were no longer required.
"I'm to answer questions if you have any," the forewoman told her, shortly; "but I guess you understand."
The girl turned a chalky face upon her.
"But I don't—"
"Then you're slower than I thought. The firm has looked you up, that's all."
Jean realized the monstrous injustice of it but slowly.
"I don't see," she faltered.
"Bosh!" cut in the woman, impatiently. "Don't try to flimflam me. Lord knows what kind of game you were working, but you had more nerve than sense. You might have guessed when you tried to put your bare word against Mr. Rose's that they'd make it their business to find out just what your word was worth. Your last employer told them."
"Told them what?" blazed Jean.
"What do you suppose? That you'd done time in a reformatory, of course."
XIV
In her dark hour came Paul.
"I know," he said, hunting her out in the corner of the melancholy drawing-room where she sat Sunday afternoon with absent eyes upon "The Trial of Effie Deans." "Some of it I guessed, and a little more filtered from AmyviaMrs. St. Aubyn, but I got the finishing touch from a man in the store."
"The store!" Jean had a moment of acute dismay; she would fain leave Paul his illusions. "What man?"
"A chap in the drug department I do work for now and then. He turned up at the parlors this morning. We're open Sundays from 'leven to one, you know."
Then, the refuge spectre had followed here! She could not look him in the face. But Paul's next words reassured.
"He didn't mention names, but I put two and two together quick enough when he told me that one of their new girls knocked out a fresh floor-walker the other night. I was proud I knew you."
"Did he know of my—my discharge?"
"No."
"You didn't mention it yourself?" Jean faltered. "Or my name?"
Paul's look was sad.
"That's a shade lower down than I think I've got," he observed loftily. "A man who'd lug in a lady friend's name under such circumstances wouldn't stop at the few trifles that still faze me. He—why, he'd even gold-crown an anterior tooth!"
She hastened to mollify him, relieved beyond measure that his chance informant knew nothing of the real reason for her dismissal. Amy could be trusted to conceal it for her own sake. Then Paul stirred her anxiety afresh with a request.
"I want to polish off Mr. Rose," he said, doubling his fist suggestively. "You made a good beginning, but the pup needs a thorough job. I know where he boards—he told me that night he butted in; and if you'll just let me call round as a friend of yours—"
"No, no. Promise me you won't!"